Friday evening Richard and I enjoyed a lovely walk to the Western Front to take in EDAM's presentation of its latest choreographic series. The fans in the studio were whirling, it was not overly crowded (though the house was more or less full, which was nice to see), and cold wine and beer was for sale by Daelik at the bar: in other words, viewing conditions were just right.
First on the program was Tom Stroud and Peter Bingham's A Delicate Balance, a duet for Delia Brett and Elissa Hansen that builds slowly and subtly, sneaking up on one's senses. Which is only fitting given that it is about memory. The piece begins with the two dancers standing against the upstage wall; their gazes are fixed resolutely outward to the audience. First Brett and then Hansen draws a hand to her face and opens her mouth in a silent scream. In voiceover we hear someone describing her memories of a house she lived in. At a certain point the performers notice each other, and they slide closer to each other along the wall, at first curiously and then more threateningly, the dancers' more or less matching height used to wonderful effect as each alternates in looming over or cowering from the other, a shadow play enfleshed and come to life. Perhaps we are witnessing a battle between the ego and the id over who owns the past (or is enslaved by it); then again, as per the epigraph from Richard Holmes in the program about the muse Mnemosyne needing a twin (one who forgets alongside her remembering), that battle might actually be between two sisters' different recollections of the house they grew up in.
After this prologue, the dancers push away from the wall and advance toward the audience in parallel lines, improvising solo movement phrases as they reach searchingly into the immediate spatial void around them, building corporeal architectures in the absence of ones made of bricks and mortar. Eventually the dancers will cross paths, making contact and, using the vocabulary of that dance form, partnering in the sharing and redistributing of each other's weight--which, in this case, must include the weight of memory. To this end, the piece ends with an uncanny visual trick whereby the two dancers' bodies become one, Brett's initially off-beat and slightly delayed mimicking of Hansen's gestures eventually matching her partner's movements exactly as she slowly moves behind her, the two bodies now a perfect palimpsest as the voiceover intones about rooms and hallways leading to still more rooms. If, as Frances Yates and Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud (among many others) have taught us, memory is essentially an architectural system, then what better medium than dance (whose archive is the body) to incarnate that system.
Following the first intermission longtime EDAM dancer Anne Cooper debuted FormSongs, which if I'm not mistaken might be her first work of original choreography. In the piece Cooper, along with partner Kelly McInnes, alternate between composed and improvised structures, solo and unison phrases, all performed to the live vocal improvisations of the wonderful DB Boyko (recorded music by Veda Hille is also used in the piece). The interplay between movement and voice was frequently fascinating to behold, as when Boyko's long sibilant exhalations of breath sent the dancers swooshing backwards into the distance, or when her staccato clucking had them ricocheting off of the floor and each other. I also appreciated the cross-disciplinary call and response aesthetic embedded into the work, with Cooper and McInnes at times answering Boyko vocally and Boyko likewise getting up from her station stage left to every now and then join the dancers in a bit of movement. On the whole, however, I think the piece went on a bit too long. The bit about the "Lemon Poem" by Pablo Neruda felt especially superfluous and unnecessary.
The evening concluded with a new work, Scenes for Your Consideration, by the always exciting Amber Funk Barton. A trio, the piece begins, like Stroud and Bingham's A Delicate Balance, along the upstage wall. Dancer Elya Grant sits on a stool, moving her hands from her thighs to her knees, and her head to her hands in perfectly controlled counts of eight as a song by Grizzly Bear plays on the soundtrack. Suddenly Andrew Haydock appears from behind the stage right door, inching his way, also in time to the music, to the empty stool beside Grant. Antonio Somero Jr makes a similarly dramatic entrance from the stage left door, and our menage is complete, as over the course of the piece the dancers will form and disperse and regroup in patterns that suggest rivalry and reciprocity, competition and care, friction and friendship.
What is so rewarding to take in is the depth and variety of choreographic skills that Barton employs to stage these scenes. A pleasingly geometric floor sequence involving the overlaying and collapsing of six sets of arms and elbows mixes a bit of unison, canon, and retrograde. Likewise, the influence of being in residence at EDAM registers in the bodily chains and gravity-defying support structures that Barton creates with her dancers. And, refreshingly, she is not afraid of stillness. One of my favourite moments in the piece is when, the music having cut out, Grant sculpts the bodies of Haydock and Somera into an interlocking tableau centre stage. All of these young dancers are on fire in this piece, with the tiny Grant especially watchable as she flings and slides her bodies across the stage floor, or bounces off of the studio walls. Barton also gives us a great ending as, with the lights fading, the dancers move upstage in a series of hugs, but always with one of them on the outside, and thus forced to break up any new relationship that forms. Something to consider, indeed.
P
Showing posts with label Delia Brett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Delia Brett. Show all posts
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Monday, May 23, 2016
Revolutions at 3681 Victoria Drive
Because their usual performance space, the Russian Hall on Campbell Avenue, is being renovated, Fight With a Stick (formerly Leaky Heaven) is presenting its newest devised creation, Revolutions, at a former warehouse space on Victoria Drive. What's more, taking their cue from the space itself and invoking the principles of scenographic dramaturgy for which they are so well known (as well as the theories of Jane Bennett and other new materialists), FWS collaborators have built a show in which site is not just a container awaiting animation by human actants, but is actually the primary animating agent.
That said, the piece begins fairly traditionally. (***WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW!***) The audience, having assembled in an anteroom at one end of the warehouse's main floor, is ushered down a few stairs and invited into a jerry-rigged plywood performance space that appears to have been purpose-built. At one end there is a bed piled with mussed-up sheets and a desk and chair. At the other end there is a platform with risers for the audience. So far so proscenium. Following the curtain speech, the lights go down and ... nothing happens. Which is, of course, not true. As we wait expectantly, our trained perspectival gaze focused on the ambiguous domestic scene in front of us, Nancy Tam's atmospheric and vaguely foreboding sound score insinuates itself into our consciousness like a horror film soundtrack, the layered thrum of its synthesizers combining eerily with the ambient acoustics of the adjacent outdoor environment (including the swoosh of the passing Skytrain, which we learned during the talkback Tam purposefully picked up and amplified with two pencil mics hidden in bushes; she also recorded, reversed and delayed the sound of the Skytrain, and then pitched it on the other side of the interior room to make it seem like there was a train moving in the opposite direction). Then there is the damp and musty smell of the semi-subterranean space that we begin to notice. Finally, and crucially only after our other senses have been piqued, there is something to focus on at the front of the stage: slowly and almost imperceptibly the sheets on the bed have begun to move. So minute is the movement at first, and so amorphously shaped is the entire mass of sheets, that one is unsure whether there is a body underneath manipulating them or if they are moving of their own accord. Just to be clear, there is in fact a body, and it belongs to Delia Brett. Nevertheless, this perceptual doubt (and ethical philosophy) about the dividing line between subject and object, the material and the immaterial, is at the core of this piece, and it will be exploited elsewhere to amazing effect (especially in Josh Hite's video projections, where for example an animated picture of the surface of a concrete wall interacts with the very thing it is meant to be a representation of, making it impossible to determine where one begins and the other leaves off, and also creating a sense of doubled perceptual porosity).
But back to our domestic scene. Eventually a human actor--Sean Marshall Jr--does intrude upon our witnessing of the moving sheets. He emerges from a tiny corner bathroom upstage right and takes a seat at the desk, lighting a small kerosene lamp. He rubs his eyes wearily and taps his glasses mechanically, every sound picked up by a hidden table mic. He appears to take no notice of what is going on underneath the sheets on the bed--until, that is, a hand suddenly reveals itself and, rather dramatically, lays itself on the surface of the table. Shades of Thing from The Addams Family, or something out of the pages of Poe: whatever one's favourite gothic reference, it is the signal for Marshall to get up and fetch whoever is attached to the hand a glass of water--and a straw to drink it with. Not that these actions necessarily mean anything profound, beyond drawing out attention to the different objects which are ostensibly mediating the interactions between the two human bodies on stage--who legitimately should be the presumptive (and undivided) focus of our attention in traditional naturalist drama (and here it strikes me that FWS's work is productively in dialogue with the theatre criticism of someone like Andrew Sofer, both his book on The Stage Life of Props and his more recent Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater and Performance).
Even the book that Marshall begins to read and take notes from refuses to offer up any wisdom in terms of its content; instead, the increasingly trite aphorisms that get repeated to us serve as a very real distraction from the physical action and changes in material form that we should be concentrating on. That is, trained as we are as good theatregoers to prioritize spoken language on stage, we are wont at first to miss the fact that Marshall is slowly moving his desk table and chair (both are on wheels) forward as he is reading his aphorisms and, even more importantly, that we audience members on our platform are moving backwards. At the talkback following the performance, several of my fellow spectators commented on experiencing feelings of nausea, which was their first sensory clue that something uncanny was going on; in my case, I admit to cottoning on to the visual trick very slowly--though when I finally realized what was happening it was one of the most astonishingly rewarding experiences in the theatre I have had in a long time, a live embodied version of a cinematic zoom out that happens so subtly and incrementally as to make you both doubt and become more hyper-attuned to your senses in relation to your immediate physical environment. Indeed, in terms of the expanding and contracting of space in Revolutions, I was very much put in mind of Catherine Deneuve slowly going crazy in her apartment in Repulsion.
The reference is not so far off, as the walls of our original performance space start breaking apart, with outside objects intruding, and with individual wall panels eventually taking on a life of their own, shooting across the floor of the warehouse (the entire expanse of which we can now see) like toy cars on a racetrack (the ingenious lego-like set is by Jay White). There are of course FWS performer-devisers (including co-directors and FWS co-ADs Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson) behind these panels manipulating them, just like they were behind our platform pulling us backwards. But that doesn't make the non-human ballet we are watching (which includes lighting design trio Kyla Gardiner, Gabriel Raminhos and Jaylene Pratt's trick of having the warehouse's built-in hanging ceiling fluorescents flicker on and off like they are extemporizing a conversation in morse code with each other) any less thrilling to behold. For what FWS have so brilliantly managed to do in this piece is flip theatrical frames mid-performance, turning a proscenium staging into an immersive experience in which space acts upon us rather than the other way around.
P
That said, the piece begins fairly traditionally. (***WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW!***) The audience, having assembled in an anteroom at one end of the warehouse's main floor, is ushered down a few stairs and invited into a jerry-rigged plywood performance space that appears to have been purpose-built. At one end there is a bed piled with mussed-up sheets and a desk and chair. At the other end there is a platform with risers for the audience. So far so proscenium. Following the curtain speech, the lights go down and ... nothing happens. Which is, of course, not true. As we wait expectantly, our trained perspectival gaze focused on the ambiguous domestic scene in front of us, Nancy Tam's atmospheric and vaguely foreboding sound score insinuates itself into our consciousness like a horror film soundtrack, the layered thrum of its synthesizers combining eerily with the ambient acoustics of the adjacent outdoor environment (including the swoosh of the passing Skytrain, which we learned during the talkback Tam purposefully picked up and amplified with two pencil mics hidden in bushes; she also recorded, reversed and delayed the sound of the Skytrain, and then pitched it on the other side of the interior room to make it seem like there was a train moving in the opposite direction). Then there is the damp and musty smell of the semi-subterranean space that we begin to notice. Finally, and crucially only after our other senses have been piqued, there is something to focus on at the front of the stage: slowly and almost imperceptibly the sheets on the bed have begun to move. So minute is the movement at first, and so amorphously shaped is the entire mass of sheets, that one is unsure whether there is a body underneath manipulating them or if they are moving of their own accord. Just to be clear, there is in fact a body, and it belongs to Delia Brett. Nevertheless, this perceptual doubt (and ethical philosophy) about the dividing line between subject and object, the material and the immaterial, is at the core of this piece, and it will be exploited elsewhere to amazing effect (especially in Josh Hite's video projections, where for example an animated picture of the surface of a concrete wall interacts with the very thing it is meant to be a representation of, making it impossible to determine where one begins and the other leaves off, and also creating a sense of doubled perceptual porosity).
But back to our domestic scene. Eventually a human actor--Sean Marshall Jr--does intrude upon our witnessing of the moving sheets. He emerges from a tiny corner bathroom upstage right and takes a seat at the desk, lighting a small kerosene lamp. He rubs his eyes wearily and taps his glasses mechanically, every sound picked up by a hidden table mic. He appears to take no notice of what is going on underneath the sheets on the bed--until, that is, a hand suddenly reveals itself and, rather dramatically, lays itself on the surface of the table. Shades of Thing from The Addams Family, or something out of the pages of Poe: whatever one's favourite gothic reference, it is the signal for Marshall to get up and fetch whoever is attached to the hand a glass of water--and a straw to drink it with. Not that these actions necessarily mean anything profound, beyond drawing out attention to the different objects which are ostensibly mediating the interactions between the two human bodies on stage--who legitimately should be the presumptive (and undivided) focus of our attention in traditional naturalist drama (and here it strikes me that FWS's work is productively in dialogue with the theatre criticism of someone like Andrew Sofer, both his book on The Stage Life of Props and his more recent Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater and Performance).
Even the book that Marshall begins to read and take notes from refuses to offer up any wisdom in terms of its content; instead, the increasingly trite aphorisms that get repeated to us serve as a very real distraction from the physical action and changes in material form that we should be concentrating on. That is, trained as we are as good theatregoers to prioritize spoken language on stage, we are wont at first to miss the fact that Marshall is slowly moving his desk table and chair (both are on wheels) forward as he is reading his aphorisms and, even more importantly, that we audience members on our platform are moving backwards. At the talkback following the performance, several of my fellow spectators commented on experiencing feelings of nausea, which was their first sensory clue that something uncanny was going on; in my case, I admit to cottoning on to the visual trick very slowly--though when I finally realized what was happening it was one of the most astonishingly rewarding experiences in the theatre I have had in a long time, a live embodied version of a cinematic zoom out that happens so subtly and incrementally as to make you both doubt and become more hyper-attuned to your senses in relation to your immediate physical environment. Indeed, in terms of the expanding and contracting of space in Revolutions, I was very much put in mind of Catherine Deneuve slowly going crazy in her apartment in Repulsion.
The reference is not so far off, as the walls of our original performance space start breaking apart, with outside objects intruding, and with individual wall panels eventually taking on a life of their own, shooting across the floor of the warehouse (the entire expanse of which we can now see) like toy cars on a racetrack (the ingenious lego-like set is by Jay White). There are of course FWS performer-devisers (including co-directors and FWS co-ADs Steven Hill and Alex Lazaridis Ferguson) behind these panels manipulating them, just like they were behind our platform pulling us backwards. But that doesn't make the non-human ballet we are watching (which includes lighting design trio Kyla Gardiner, Gabriel Raminhos and Jaylene Pratt's trick of having the warehouse's built-in hanging ceiling fluorescents flicker on and off like they are extemporizing a conversation in morse code with each other) any less thrilling to behold. For what FWS have so brilliantly managed to do in this piece is flip theatrical frames mid-performance, turning a proscenium staging into an immersive experience in which space acts upon us rather than the other way around.
P
Friday, March 18, 2016
Vancouver Dance History (2006-2016): Post 9
Following a debrief of the excellent Exact Vertigo conversation at UNIT/PITT Projects on Wednesday evening, and after a bit of Thursday morning chocolate cake, yesterday Justine and Alexa helped me to record a short movement-based video loop I wished to use as a supplement to an academic paper I'm currently writing. I had brought matching sailor hats for the occasion, though I'm not sure they exactly suited our physical score. We chose to cycle through a few of the poses from the end of the "Duet" section of Yvonne Rainer's Terrain, which she first performed at Judson Church with Trisha Brown, I believe, and which Justine will be reperforming as part of a collaboration with the video artist Evann Siebens this coming Saturday evening. Even with Justine beside me calling out the movements, I was pretty hopeless--but, in terms of my paper, that's partly the illustrative point.
The real challenge will come in the following weeks as we work to develop potential scores for our own project in conjunction with our interviews and writing. As Justine suggested, it makes sense to pursue these tracks together rather than tacking movement on at the very end.
In the second hour we were joined by Delia Brett, the latest Vancouver dance artist to consent to an interview. She shared some amazing stories, including the decision of her ballet teacher that Delia alone among her students was a "modern dancer," and so deserving of extra tutelage in the form--which apparently amounted to biweekly lessons in working with a theraband and flexing her feet. Delia also told us about her first encounter with Peter Bingham, which was when he came to Duncan as part of a theatre festival to give a workshop and chose Delia (who was around 14 at the time) as his demonstration partner for various contact techniques. Delia said that the moment Peter sloughed his body down the side of hers she knew she wanted to trade in her then burgeoning film and television acting career for a life in dance.
This life has meant dancing for a who's who of Vancouver choreographers, culminating in her joining forces with Daelik, following what they dubbed the disastrous "Homewreck" tour, to build MACHiNENOiSY into the company it is today. Along the way there was a hair-raising trip to Belgium in 2003 for a festival of Canadian dance that also involved Justine, and during which Delia's body went into full system collapse. Except for when she was on stage--which Justine confirmed by describing the incredible backbend accompanied by forward tendu that she still remembers Delia performing. And, I should say on this last point, that Delia was incredibly physical over the course of her interview, which gives us some added material to work with.
While Delia expressed a lot of frustration with the dance scene in Vancouver, particularly with respect to its different presentational, institutional, and financial impediments, she also said that she couldn't ever foresee a future where she wasn't dancing. Having just seen her in Bingham's Secret Life of Trees that is something to treasure.
P.
The real challenge will come in the following weeks as we work to develop potential scores for our own project in conjunction with our interviews and writing. As Justine suggested, it makes sense to pursue these tracks together rather than tacking movement on at the very end.
In the second hour we were joined by Delia Brett, the latest Vancouver dance artist to consent to an interview. She shared some amazing stories, including the decision of her ballet teacher that Delia alone among her students was a "modern dancer," and so deserving of extra tutelage in the form--which apparently amounted to biweekly lessons in working with a theraband and flexing her feet. Delia also told us about her first encounter with Peter Bingham, which was when he came to Duncan as part of a theatre festival to give a workshop and chose Delia (who was around 14 at the time) as his demonstration partner for various contact techniques. Delia said that the moment Peter sloughed his body down the side of hers she knew she wanted to trade in her then burgeoning film and television acting career for a life in dance.
This life has meant dancing for a who's who of Vancouver choreographers, culminating in her joining forces with Daelik, following what they dubbed the disastrous "Homewreck" tour, to build MACHiNENOiSY into the company it is today. Along the way there was a hair-raising trip to Belgium in 2003 for a festival of Canadian dance that also involved Justine, and during which Delia's body went into full system collapse. Except for when she was on stage--which Justine confirmed by describing the incredible backbend accompanied by forward tendu that she still remembers Delia performing. And, I should say on this last point, that Delia was incredibly physical over the course of her interview, which gives us some added material to work with.
While Delia expressed a lot of frustration with the dance scene in Vancouver, particularly with respect to its different presentational, institutional, and financial impediments, she also said that she couldn't ever foresee a future where she wasn't dancing. Having just seen her in Bingham's Secret Life of Trees that is something to treasure.
P.
Saturday, March 12, 2016
The Secret Life of Trees at VIDF
In The Secret Life of Trees, which is on at the Roundhouse as part of this year's Vancouver International Dance Festival through this evening, EDAM's Peter Bingham takes his choreographic inspiration from the idea that trees communicate with each other (and presumably their environment) through their "intricate entwining root systems." Likewise, in creating this piece, Bingham and his dancers have worked to develop "different sensory pathways to connect to each other" in the space and time of performance.
Such communication begins when dancers Walter Kubanek, Chengxin Wei, Anne Cooper and Olivia Shaffer enter through one of the three square archways--one stage left, two stage right--positioned in front of the wings, portals one imagines to the forest that lies just beyond. Kubanek and Wei slide to the floor upstage, sitting back-to-back, with Wei facing the audience. Cooper and Shaffer lie supine on the floor in two rectangles of light stage right. Wei begins to move his feet, turning them in and out, left and right; he raises his arms and domes his hands, rotating them at the wrist, first this way, and then that, as if telegraphing some secret gestural message. It's one that Cooper and Shaffer pick up on, their feet responding in kind to Wei's proffered address (which we also hear, briefly, in a bit of voiceover).
Just how in sync these three dancers are becomes clear after Kubanek exits the stage and, following a robust contact sequence, the trio separates for some isolated unison floorwork. The dancers are positioned so closely to one another, and their movements are so complicated and physical that it is a wonder they don't hit each other when blindly extending a leg into space, or when rolling backwards in this or that direction. But then just as trees seem to be able to make room for one another on a crowded forest floor, so are dancers of this caliber able to draw on a highly honed kinaesthetic awareness, a keen sense not just of back and front but also, in this case, of beside.
There then follows two gorgeous duets. The first, featuring Shaffer and Delia Brett, is faster and more vigorous and covers much more stage space in its incorporation of lateral lifts and rolls, and in the dancers' explorations of different surfaces of bodily contact and support. The second, between Brett and James Gnam, is slower and more still. It begins with the two dancers walking downstage and matter-of-factly removing their shirts. As the voiceover tells us that we are about to hear a selection of plant songs, Brett slowly begins to trace her fingers in looping and intertwining patterns along Gnam's back and arms, like a childhood game of spelling out letters and words up and down a friend's spine. Brett's touch is delicate and tender, like a lover's, and Gnam's vertebrae and ribs respond to the intimacy by undulating like tree branches swaying in a gentle breeze. When Gnam reciprocates he also reaches around to touch the small and vulnerable area between Brett's throat and breastbone, which struck me as an especially solicitous moment. After this sequence the dancers move further upstage, and amid a series of black and white and colour video projections by Chris Randle that are accompanied by a voiceover narrative written and spoken by Bingham, Brett and Gnam cycle through several semi-lifted poses, their limbs a tangled system of support and ballast.
The piece concludes with a final trio, this time with Kubanek, who has been something of a silent observer up until now, joining Shaffer and Wei in a bit of balletic parody before moving into a final and highly satisfying contact sequence. If, in their rhizomatic structural threading, tree roots have a mostly horizontal orientation, and if they further work to stabilize not just the tree trunks to which they are attached, but also the soil around them, then they are an apt metaphor for the connection to and from ground that is at the heart of contact.
P.
Such communication begins when dancers Walter Kubanek, Chengxin Wei, Anne Cooper and Olivia Shaffer enter through one of the three square archways--one stage left, two stage right--positioned in front of the wings, portals one imagines to the forest that lies just beyond. Kubanek and Wei slide to the floor upstage, sitting back-to-back, with Wei facing the audience. Cooper and Shaffer lie supine on the floor in two rectangles of light stage right. Wei begins to move his feet, turning them in and out, left and right; he raises his arms and domes his hands, rotating them at the wrist, first this way, and then that, as if telegraphing some secret gestural message. It's one that Cooper and Shaffer pick up on, their feet responding in kind to Wei's proffered address (which we also hear, briefly, in a bit of voiceover).
Just how in sync these three dancers are becomes clear after Kubanek exits the stage and, following a robust contact sequence, the trio separates for some isolated unison floorwork. The dancers are positioned so closely to one another, and their movements are so complicated and physical that it is a wonder they don't hit each other when blindly extending a leg into space, or when rolling backwards in this or that direction. But then just as trees seem to be able to make room for one another on a crowded forest floor, so are dancers of this caliber able to draw on a highly honed kinaesthetic awareness, a keen sense not just of back and front but also, in this case, of beside.
There then follows two gorgeous duets. The first, featuring Shaffer and Delia Brett, is faster and more vigorous and covers much more stage space in its incorporation of lateral lifts and rolls, and in the dancers' explorations of different surfaces of bodily contact and support. The second, between Brett and James Gnam, is slower and more still. It begins with the two dancers walking downstage and matter-of-factly removing their shirts. As the voiceover tells us that we are about to hear a selection of plant songs, Brett slowly begins to trace her fingers in looping and intertwining patterns along Gnam's back and arms, like a childhood game of spelling out letters and words up and down a friend's spine. Brett's touch is delicate and tender, like a lover's, and Gnam's vertebrae and ribs respond to the intimacy by undulating like tree branches swaying in a gentle breeze. When Gnam reciprocates he also reaches around to touch the small and vulnerable area between Brett's throat and breastbone, which struck me as an especially solicitous moment. After this sequence the dancers move further upstage, and amid a series of black and white and colour video projections by Chris Randle that are accompanied by a voiceover narrative written and spoken by Bingham, Brett and Gnam cycle through several semi-lifted poses, their limbs a tangled system of support and ballast.
The piece concludes with a final trio, this time with Kubanek, who has been something of a silent observer up until now, joining Shaffer and Wei in a bit of balletic parody before moving into a final and highly satisfying contact sequence. If, in their rhizomatic structural threading, tree roots have a mostly horizontal orientation, and if they further work to stabilize not just the tree trunks to which they are attached, but also the soil around them, then they are an apt metaphor for the connection to and from ground that is at the heart of contact.
P.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Dance in Vancouver: Justine A. Chambers, Vanessa Goodman, and Delia Brett
It's been such a busy week that I only got to my first Dance in Vancouver events yesterday. The biennial showcase and presenting platform for local dance artists is guest curated this year by Pirjetta Mulari, of Dance Info Finland. I've always wondered about the reasoning behind DIV's outside curatorial invitations. Presumably programming choices depend a lot on knowing who has presentation-ready work, which necessarily means liaising with local folks. And, to be sure, staff at The Dance Centre are heavily involved in the entire organization of the event, including various studio showings and presenter meetings and parallel performances.
Thus it was that I got to tag along yesterday afternoon on the second of two "Choreographic Walks" programmed by Dance Centre Artist-in-Residence Justine A. Chambers. Modelled on the soundwalks of Vancouver pioneered by R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp, Chambers' curated two-hour stroll through the city's downtown core invites audiences to silently observe several works of site-specific dance created by local artists, including: a lesson in directional (and accessible) navigation by Naomi Brand at the southwest plaza of the VPL's Central Branch; a spatially dispersed but acoustically proximate clapping fugue by Alexa Mardon at Victory Square; and a game of pick-up basketball underneath the Cambie Street bridge by Deanna Peters (in which there wasn't much scoring, but a lot of running and passing with elan). But the walk also invites us to place these works into larger choreographic frameworks and patterns that are part of the social infrastructure of the city, be it pedestrians crossing an intersection, kids playing in a park, or the often anonymous workers who maintain the various invisible grids and networks that buttress our daily navigation of the city in the first place. Then, too, there are the ways in which we, as a group (numbering 20+), effect and change different movement flows, from holding up traffic at an intersection to absorbing and spitting out groups of people we just happen to collect accidentally along our route. This kind of shadow choreography in which we daily and reflexively participate as urban dwellers, but which we tend to relegate to background "movement noise" (the dance with and around others we do on the bus or in line at the supermarket), is here uncamouflaged and brought to the foreground by the "openings" in our walk that Chambers and her partner Josh Hite programmed with the help of students in the Modus Operandi Training Program: that is, at moments along our route, and ably cued by our pace-setting guide Kate Franklin, all we had to do was cast a sideline glance across an alley to catch a glimpse of tandem selves matching our steps, moving us forward.
In the evening, it was back to The Dance Centre for Saturday night's mainstage presentation of Vanessa Goodman/action at a distance's Wells Hill and Delia Brett/MACHiNENOiSY's plaything. I've blogged about the original presentation of Wells Hill, as part of the 2015 Chutzpah! Festival, here. The movement is as gorgeous as ever, at once languid and sinewy and robustly energetic in a way that is equally responsive to Gould playing Bach and to Gabriel Saloman's original immersive sound score. It was also interesting to see the piece in the more intimate setting of The Dance Centre (which I gather partly inspired the new costumes designed by Ziyian Kwan), and to witness the individual embodied contributions of new cast members Karissa Barry, Dario Dinuzzi, and Alexa Mardon. I look forward to the premiere of the full piece in 2017 at SFU Woodward's.
MACHiNENOiSY's plaything is what I'll call a "collaborative solo" for co-artistic director Brett. First presented in 2011, the work is a surreal dream/nightmare based on the childhood drawings of Brett's son, Beckett. Part shadow play, part puppet show, and part experiment in live projection action painting, the work's immersive visuals are at times jaw-droppingly gorgeous and at other times queasiness-inducing. But all of this is anchored by the moving performance of Brett, who whether growing an extra set of limbs from behind a scrim or unzipping a body suit to reveal another layer of synthetic skin underneath reveals--like Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, or Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror--that motherhood is as much about the abject as the object of one's love.
P.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
PuSh 2015: Time Machine
The always adventurous and ever-experimenting MACHiNENOiSY, co-directed by local dance artists Delia Brett and Daelik, take another risk with their latest full-evening work. Time Machine, created during the company's recent residency at The Dance Centre, and premiering there last night in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival, pairs five adult dancers with eight child performers. What results, set to an original score by Chris Kelly that is performed live by Kelly, Peggy Lee and Dylan van der Schyff, is a whimsical yet rigorously conceptualized exploration of the porous borders between innocence and experience, art and play, fantasy and reality.
What most struck me about the work is its sensuous and material exploration of shape. At the top of the show, large geometric felt squares and cut-out circles designed by sculptor and visual artist Natalie Purschwitz are arranged into different built structures, only to be knocked down with deliberate glee by both the adults and the kids. This reminded me that one of our earliest developmental processes as children is learning to subvert, through movement, the expected outcomes of cognition and intellection: figuring out how to jam that round peg into a square hole; or adding the last building block to our tower in such a way that it will purposefully topple over. Purschwitz also designed the costumes for the show, including the stretchy black and white biomorphic bits of fabric that several of the adult dancers move inside, at once suggesting classic images from Martha Graham and the shadows kids create on their bedroom walls at night with their hands.
In some cases the children in the show are performing alongside their parents (as in the case of the family Gnam--James, Natalie and Finn), which raises additional questions of inheritance, physical and otherwise. This is something that is brought out in the kinetic juxtaposition and commingling of fully developed and still-growing bodies on stage. Sometimes this mash-up produces obvious contrasts of size and shape--as when the youngest of the performers crawl all over Daelik and pull out the stuffing from his bodybuilder costume. At other times, one is forced to do a double-take--especially when one of the larger of the youth performers is paired with Natalie Lefebvre Gnam, who herself looks like a teenager. That the whole work ends with an arresting visual tableau of many of these differently aged and sized and trained bodies melding into the busily patterned background of one of Purschwitz's large moveable felt pieces only reinforces the point that in the co-conceived world of MACHiNENOiSY, where the spontaneous creativity of children is given equal weight alongside the practised execution of adults, it is impossible to separate decorative embellishment from core structure, wallpaper from wall.
P.
What most struck me about the work is its sensuous and material exploration of shape. At the top of the show, large geometric felt squares and cut-out circles designed by sculptor and visual artist Natalie Purschwitz are arranged into different built structures, only to be knocked down with deliberate glee by both the adults and the kids. This reminded me that one of our earliest developmental processes as children is learning to subvert, through movement, the expected outcomes of cognition and intellection: figuring out how to jam that round peg into a square hole; or adding the last building block to our tower in such a way that it will purposefully topple over. Purschwitz also designed the costumes for the show, including the stretchy black and white biomorphic bits of fabric that several of the adult dancers move inside, at once suggesting classic images from Martha Graham and the shadows kids create on their bedroom walls at night with their hands.
In some cases the children in the show are performing alongside their parents (as in the case of the family Gnam--James, Natalie and Finn), which raises additional questions of inheritance, physical and otherwise. This is something that is brought out in the kinetic juxtaposition and commingling of fully developed and still-growing bodies on stage. Sometimes this mash-up produces obvious contrasts of size and shape--as when the youngest of the performers crawl all over Daelik and pull out the stuffing from his bodybuilder costume. At other times, one is forced to do a double-take--especially when one of the larger of the youth performers is paired with Natalie Lefebvre Gnam, who herself looks like a teenager. That the whole work ends with an arresting visual tableau of many of these differently aged and sized and trained bodies melding into the busily patterned background of one of Purschwitz's large moveable felt pieces only reinforces the point that in the co-conceived world of MACHiNENOiSY, where the spontaneous creativity of children is given equal weight alongside the practised execution of adults, it is impossible to separate decorative embellishment from core structure, wallpaper from wall.
P.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Bamboozled at Dancing on the Edge
MACHiNENOiSY's Daelik and Delia Brett have long sought to marry the low-fi, pedestrian movement practices of Contact Improvisation with high concept theatricality and showmanship. In their latest work, Bamboozled, which premiered last night at The Dance Centre as part of the 25th anniversary of the Dancing on the Edge Festival, it's not an equal partnership. There's too much individual role-playing and not enough shared moments of dance.
Granted, as the artists note in the program, the piece is a conscious riff on the "cult of personality" that ruled the nineteenth-century stages of vaudeville, burlesque, the fairground sideshow, and even silent film. And so to the tune of composer-musician Petunia's zydeco-inflected score, we are treated to a succession of larger-than-life types--contortionists and cowboys, bearded ladies and disappearing men--and their various one-note, look-at-me schticks. The problem is that those schticks go on a bit too long, or are unnecessarily supplemented and embroidered: Bevin Poole makes an endearingly awkward chorine struggling to insert herself into the posed tableaux of the other performers at the top of the show, but we are treated to about two or three poses too many; and the conceptual force of Tanya Podlozniak's live narration of Daelik's disappearing act is undercut by Poole's narration of her narration, and, as if this weren't already stretching things, Alex Ferguson's subsequent narration of Poole's narration of Podlozniak's narration.
By contrast, the contact sequences are few and far between: an early cross-gendered duet by Daelik and Brett that ended far too quickly; a later trio that sees Poole more than pulling her weight alongside the company's co-directors; and a moving, largely prone duet between Daelik and and a pregnant Podlozniuk that yielded some of the most compelling images of the evening. These movement sequences seem to unfold independently from the main theatrical action, which struck me as odd, as the moments when dance and theatre do come together formally and conceptually in the show are among the strongest. I am thinking especially, in this regard, of the jerky cowboy trio composed of Brett, Poole and Jamie Tea, or the dual waltz between carney Ferguson and Poole and Tea as a pair of Siamese twins joined at the ankle.
I longed for far more of these instances, when the force of MACHiNENOiSY's abundant ideas about social and gender transgression, for example, cohered with their choreographic mash-up of different performance styles.
P.
Granted, as the artists note in the program, the piece is a conscious riff on the "cult of personality" that ruled the nineteenth-century stages of vaudeville, burlesque, the fairground sideshow, and even silent film. And so to the tune of composer-musician Petunia's zydeco-inflected score, we are treated to a succession of larger-than-life types--contortionists and cowboys, bearded ladies and disappearing men--and their various one-note, look-at-me schticks. The problem is that those schticks go on a bit too long, or are unnecessarily supplemented and embroidered: Bevin Poole makes an endearingly awkward chorine struggling to insert herself into the posed tableaux of the other performers at the top of the show, but we are treated to about two or three poses too many; and the conceptual force of Tanya Podlozniak's live narration of Daelik's disappearing act is undercut by Poole's narration of her narration, and, as if this weren't already stretching things, Alex Ferguson's subsequent narration of Poole's narration of Podlozniak's narration.
By contrast, the contact sequences are few and far between: an early cross-gendered duet by Daelik and Brett that ended far too quickly; a later trio that sees Poole more than pulling her weight alongside the company's co-directors; and a moving, largely prone duet between Daelik and and a pregnant Podlozniuk that yielded some of the most compelling images of the evening. These movement sequences seem to unfold independently from the main theatrical action, which struck me as odd, as the moments when dance and theatre do come together formally and conceptually in the show are among the strongest. I am thinking especially, in this regard, of the jerky cowboy trio composed of Brett, Poole and Jamie Tea, or the dual waltz between carney Ferguson and Poole and Tea as a pair of Siamese twins joined at the ankle.
I longed for far more of these instances, when the force of MACHiNENOiSY's abundant ideas about social and gender transgression, for example, cohered with their choreographic mash-up of different performance styles.
P.
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